RDF Gold (v6.0) Tweaks/Ideas - Comments Please

[Baak]

I'm getting in the mood to crank out the "definitive" Rocket Dorf Fest - dubbed RDF Gold - and I am posting this here by way of jotting down my own notes and to get feedback from YOU.

Please comment - but only if you play RDF.


Here's a list of the changes I have in mind right now:

1. New Fireball Graphics - I have been wanting to do this for a long time. I'm playing around with some interesting ideas and will see if I can come up with something new and cool looking for *all* the RDF Fireballs. Any help/tips/whatever here is welcome. I want to make them look like a real fireball yet funky-magical-dorflike-cool.
   
   
2. Less fire - possibly colorful flames - I'm thinking of toning down the sheer amount of fire in the game so we're not constantly walking around flames. I'm also debating adding "color" to the flames in accordance to the type of fireball being used. Might look cool - might s00k.
   
   
3. Slow Fireball - adjust or replace? - I'm not 100% happy with the Slow Fireball attack (for RD's and Giants). Am highly open to comments here, including making it a different attack (note that the "funky fireballs" such as rebounding, etc. are still on the list of RDF modz and will come out with or after RDF Gold).
   
   I'm wanting to simplify the Slow Fireball (or alternative attack) and have the following ideas: (a) Give the attack the same recharge rate (time before next attack) as the normal fireball - right now it takes 1.5x as long, which I think is just confusing; (b) I'm thinking of making the fireball radius/damage more similar to a regular fireball (I have to look up what it is now), perhaps 90% and/or giving it the same radius/damage but a higher percent of duds. Comments please.
   
   
4. Mondo Flareball - I haven't been happy with this and it really is just a type of Flare Dorf flare, AND it wreaks havoc with the T-Ghols since they can't pick them up properly (a quirk of the Myth Engine regarding multiple projectiles that would require a lot of work to get around), so I came up with the following that seems like an excellent solution to me - please comment:
   
   Start them with one Stunball and they can carry a max of one - just like Minis. Give them a Special Attack which is tossing the Stunball and if I can possibly swing it, I'll make the Special such that at closer range it's a "fastball" and at longer range it's a "high lob". This should give them a neat little twist on the existing Stunball (which I like) as well as simplify EVERYTHING (Minis and Mondos and even T-Ghols (not 2Pus) can pick up and use the Stunballs - TOTALLY SIMPLE!!).
   
   
5. Colossus - I'm going to fix their fireball such that it has the same "pre-ignition lead time" as other fireballs, meaning it cannot explode in very close range. This may alleviate the need to tweak away the "cannot hurt themselves with shot", although I plan to try that as well to see how it plays.
   
   After playing last night (2006-11-04) I had another idea with the Colossus: since their fireballs is SO powerful (and I really like it), what about giving it a little twist in that it is "mana-based"? I would have a mana bar that the enemy cannot see, but this might make them a little more balanced.
   
   Right now their Special Attack is a "Colossus Club" (with extra mayo) - personally I like this rather than giving them a Slow Fireball.
   
   
6. Single Plugins? - I am seriously thinking about making the RDF plugins "one plugin" instead of two, especially since we now combine with so many other plugins. Thoughts?
   
   
7. RDF Solo - I am not likely to have time to mess with RDF Solo, but I may put a fix in for the TFL Balor's Head bug that Monstertool found!

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Please comment on the above and/or add other comments, suggestions, requests, whatever.

Thanks!

[sillek]

[*]Less fire - possibly colorful flames

Personally, I love fire. You can tell that by the ring of incendiary grenades I placed around the centre of Knuckle WWII. Maybe if you could keep the same amount of fire [colours are ok ], but increase the RDs resistance to fire ?

[*]Slow Fireball - adjust or replace?

Maybe have it have a smaller area of effect, but be lethal ? The same recharge rate would be nice.

[*]Mondo Flareball

OK, I'm confused.

[*]Colossus

Yes, I would enjoy not suiciding all of my units due to this.
Mana bar ? Would require some time tweaking.
Yes..please, no slow/powerful fireball for giants.

[*]Single Plugins?

Huh ? One ? Two ? Whah ?

[Baak]

Good stuff - replies below:

Fire - Walk With Me: The RD's are already very resistant to fire, because otherwise they'd be torched a bit too easily. I haven't played around with "fire" per se in Fear yet, but I'm hoping to be able to adjust some properties of it a little, like having it die down a bit faster, etc. We'll just have to play with this one - may be ok as-is - but was thinking having a tinge of color in there might be kinda neat. Then again it might look awful.

Slow Fireballs The same recharge rate is definitely a must - it's too confusing right now. I like the idea of a smaller radius as well. I fiddled with combinations of smaller radius/damage so many times before 5.1 went public that I think I ended up with something I wasn't happy with. I'll play around with 80% radius and same damage with the same recharge rate.

Mondo Flareball This is the Special attack for the Mondo. It's very similar to a Flare Dorf flare, calling in an airstrike of mini fireballs. They are red instead of the purple Stunball the Minis use. In RDF 5.0 I had the Mondo Special attack as a Stunball that was the same as their "close range low-arc" attack. I think putting their Special back to this will simplify things a bit and make them more versatile with Minis because both can pick up each others ammo. Also the T-Ghols can't pick up Flareballs properly right now (they disappear) because they act as Mondo ammo and T-Ghols already have Stunballs listed as something they can pick up and toss. Bottom line: it would simplify a whole bunch of stuff around Mondos and Minis.

Colossus We don't play using them much but I still like them - the Trow of the RDF world as it were. Right now they don't have a Slow Fireball but instead have a Colossus Club (sounds like a great sandwich) Special attack - I think this is good. The problem with them imo is their fireball attack is so powerful that it's nearly invincible - although it is highly dependent on terrain. I believe the recharge rate is way too fast for these guys and thus I was thinking of using a mana-bar for their fireball attack since I want the recharge rate to be longer and it would be nice to know if your own Colossi are "recharged" (otherwise it's hard to tell). In Patch 1.5+ I can make the mana bars such that the enemy can't see them. Using mana for these guys could also mean you could have two Fireball attacks in relatively quick succession (i.e. their fireball attack acts like a Warlock). This might make them much more playable.

Single Plugins Currently RDF is a two-plugin deal: you have to have both the "+tagz" plugin and an RDF "Unit Set" active to play. We've debated this before but I'm seriously considering making RDF Gold a one-plugin deal where all the unit sets include the +tagz plugin in them. This will make the overall RDF set much larger (like 120 MB instead of 12 MB) but will save a lot of time/hassle for the host. Also, I can release the RDF Solo separately to make the downloads more manageable, and possibly remove a unit set such as "Hero Madness" (which we never use). On my list of Myth Projects are "RDF Modz" which include things like "rebounding fireballs" as a replacement Special attack (imagine using these in Cage for example). Having the RDF plugins as one-plugin means that adding the RDF modz will be easier (two total plugins instead of three).


Other stuff I either forgot to list or didn't get into:

Less Exploding In-your-face Stuff At one point with RDF 5.0 the Slow Fireballs did NOT blow up when other fireballs exploded by them. I really liked this, but it actually came about due to a bug in Patch 1.5.0 that went away in Patch 1.5.1. There was so much chaos around this time that Myrd was going to add the behavior back in for me in a different setting - I haven't gone back yet to see if this is still possible. I'd actually like to play with the possibility of having LESS "exploding in your face" ESPECIALLY with Giants. I'd like to see how the game plays if fireballs didn't explode as easily (i.e. you could get a shot off even if someone's shot was blowing you up). Right now you can get caught in evil cycles where there is seemingly no way to get a shot out before it blows up in your face.

RDF Modz As mentioned briefly above, these have been on my list for a long time now. Simply put the first of these would be modz of the RD/Giant Special attack. For example: imagine an RDF Modz plugin that make the RD/Giant Special a "rebounding" Fireball - i.e. one that normally bounces off of stuff and blows up only at the very end of its trajectory. It would have the "cluck effect" of NOT bouncing (i.e. blowing up on impact) every now and then just like non-hero RD/Giants have the "cluck effect" of bouncing every now and then. These fireballs would otherwise be identical to regular fireballs. Using this plugin on top of RDF Gold would be very interesting on maps such as SHRDF (and others). Again, this is where having RDF Gold as a one-plugin deal would make life for the host much simpler.

RDF Gold Solo I may or may not even have time to mess with this, which means it may be that RDF Gold is only a multiplayer deal. What I plan to do right now is to do RDF Gold multiplayer *first* and leave the Solo as a separate project. People who still want to play RDF Solo can always play the RDF 5.1 version. This way we can get the RDF Gold MP completed and I can work on the Solo as a separate project (and finish up my "RDF Return to White Falls" plugin that has been sitting on my desk for two years in 80% completed form).

[sillek]

How about having fire do no damage but last a long time ? Sorry..just a pyromaniac.

One plug-in ? So how do you choose whether you want giants or minis ?

Less exploding in your face is great...that's what I meant about Colossi..I always end up suiciding.

RDF bouncing ? You mean...like pinball or something ? All shots bounce until they've gone the maximum travelling distance ? This would make Stoneheart crazy.

[Baak]

How about having fire do no damage but last a long time ? Sorry..just a pyromaniac.

One plug-in ? So how do you choose whether you want giants or minis ?

Less exploding in your face is great...that's what I meant about Colossi..I always end up suiciding.

RDF bouncing ? You mean...like pinball or something ? All shots bounce until they've gone the maximum travelling distance ? This would make Stoneheart crazy.

One-plugin in the sense of "one plugin for each" - for example for rd madness instead of:

rdf +tagz
rdf rd madness

it'd just be:

rdf rd madness

Was also debating making spiders "tougher" - more like the Evil ones in the Solo game

[Pyro]

One idea for new fireball graphics would be what I did for a fetch unit in my current plugin. I duplicated the warlock collection, exported the fireball bitmaps, edited them in Photoshop, replace the old ones with the new ones... and ta da I got a white fireball instead of orange and yellow fireball. I've always wanted to make a fetch attack similar to the warlock's fireball. Now imagine red, purple, green, yellow, and blue for those warlock fireballs. I like how they look. Or what if you have the fireball contrail be the color of the projectile. Like say I'm playing a game... my green fireball will actually be dark red with green fire as the contrail. This way when you see a fireball you know who attacked you and the contrail tells you what type of fireball it is. I'm not very fond of this idea but its an idea.

As for new attack ideas, I gave this fetch unit a stormball. It looks like the warlock fireball but is white, its almost half the speed, less radius for the area of effect blast, instead of explosion it does explosive electricity damage, and the contrail releases sparks that cause area of effect electric damage. The stormball will not explode but continue to keep moving until it hits something. The object tag for the stormball has -1.00 for electric damage and -0.50 for explosive and fire damages. Like how a hurricane will get stronger with the heat from the ocean. So if you send a regular fetch to stop the stormball it will only send it to a different direction instead of destroy it. This attack can pass by an enemy and be hurting them when the sparks make contact with them. So maybe have a slow fireball that is spitting out smaller fireballs doing little damage that can add up if that ball is too close to bounces back from the edge of the map. The slow fireball itself could be lethal but is slow enough that anybody to sees it can walk away from its path... unless they have been targeted then it will pursue them.

About the flareballs and T-Ghols. I've always wanted the T-Ghols to be able to use the flareballs. What I did for my current plugin was I have ambient wights. If the wights are hit they "bleed" stuff like sats, arrow ammo, roots, unlit flares, and dispersal orbs. The wights will constantly regenerate health so they can be used for ammo if you don't kill them. In the map each team has a unit that can pick up small projectiles. They can pick up the unlit flare and throw it. Once it hits the ground the flare becomes lit again. If I remember correctly the way I made the unlit flares not to lit when they hit the ground when they come out of the wight was by using the safe acceleration values. I made it low enough where they can fall of the wight and stay unlit, but when picked up and throw it would hit the ground and detonate/promote to a normal flare.

I think less plugins is a good idea.

I like fire. Colorful fire might go great too.

I remember there being green, red, yellow, and purple fireballs... but not blue. Use a blue one for a new additional attack maybe?

How about a healing blue fireball? Have the T-Ghols pick them up and throw. It would heal on touch or area of effect and bounce and move around the map... it can't be destroyed by anything except lifespan which should be long. Hey I see a blue ball... run in front of it! I made roots heal on touch in my plugin. So I got units like ghols picking them up and throwing them at units to heal. Then picking them up again and save them for later. Which is useful against the ambient wights that randomly attack in my map.

[Baak]

Dang - I had a nice reply and it was deleted... DOH... Will try again:


Excellent feedback guys - keep it coming!


Well, great minds think alike, obviously - I've had a Warlock fireball collection especially extracted by Haravikk sitting on my desk for several months now. This is where I plan to place the new RDF Fireballs. I've fiddled with the Warlock fireball itself (I also like it) but have now turned to a completely new fireball image. I found the perfect one on the web but have yet to get permission to use it (I wrote a nice email but it may have been lost in spam-traps, etc. - who knows). I am now looking into making my own version of the same kind of fireball (Frum is helping here as well). It has a nice "magical yet different look" that I'm after.


Excellent stuff on the fireball itself and contrail - definitely on my list of "complete revision" - the fireballs/explosion effects are the one thing I really want to tweak for RDF Gold.

Way, way back when I first did RDF I wanted to have "player colored" fireballs. After I fiddled with them for awhile I decided it might actually be more confusing to have this, especially for certain player colors such as black. I've thought about this again now that I am planning on redoing the fireballs and have some additional thoughts:

• I'm thinking first of making the RD/Giant Hero fireballs green/yellow instead of the current orange/white (for regular/slow fireballs respectively). I think that not knowing if you are being attacked by a Hero might be more interesting and strategic - otherwise it's a bit too obvious mb.
  
• From here I could see having the fireballs themselves be green/yellow but the contrail (as you mentioned) having the tint of player color. I think this would be very interesting indeed. I'd like to have the contrail be less "graphics intensive" too (the dorf flames are fairly intensive).

The trick for me is I'm wanting to have a 16-step Warlock fireball and right now the Warlock collection I have is only the 8 images. I'm also not precisely sure at this point how to do the contrail to have player colors (I think I know how but haven't fiddled with that for ages).


The problem with the Mondo Flareballs and T-Ghols is the "dropped" Flareballs are ammo for the Mondos just like the "dropped" Stunballs are ammo for the Minis.

I have the T-Ghols able to use the Stunball "ammo" as an attack along with being able to pick up certain-sized projectiles (i.e. Pus Packets). Unfortunately you can only have one "ammo" per unit, thus when the T-Ghols pick up the Mondo Flareball "ammo" it remains as "ammo" and does not allow them to attack with it.

I fiddled with making the ammo into artifacts and perhaps I just need to revisit that again now that there have been so many tweaks to artifacts (some of which I requested!). Perhaps somehow making Minis/Mondos/T-Ghols able to pick up and use Stunballs and Flareballs both would be interesting! I could probably convert Pus Packets into artifacts to weed them out or some other such magic...

All of the above is why I am seriously debating removing Flareballs and just giving Mondos back their own Stunball attack (a low-arc toss) so that there is just the one ammo type and everything works interchangeably in an extremely simple way.

I kind of have this love-hate thing going with the Flareballs.



I think the one-plugin per unit set thing is definitely on the "must do" list now.



Finally: there is a "blue fireball" but it is hidden. I use straight-up blue (i.e. 0000FF) for the "pre-ignition fireball" - one that just has a contrail and nothing else - in the second or so before the "active" fireball appears. Since I use pure-blue as the background masking color on all fireballs I just made one that was all blue to retain the same size/shape as the active fireballs on pre-ignition. A bit of RDF Trivia there.

[Pyro]

I like the flareballs. But then again I'm Pyro. There is a way to have flareballs and stunballs and have both T-Ghol usable.

Have the ammo "Use Acceleration Values" and have a "Max. Safe Acceleration" of 0.025. For Promotion you have the actual flareball attack projectile with a detonation fraction of 1.0. I think also have it checked as "Becomes Dormant at Rest". Have T-Ghols be able to pick up small projectiles and it will be able to use stunballs and flareballs while the proper dwarves will use each as ammo.

For the contrail what about the warlock fireball contrail... or an edited version of that?

[vinylrake]

[list=1]
[*]New Fireball Graphics - I have been wanting to do this for a long time. I'm playing around with some interesting ideas and will see if I can come up with something new and cool looking for *all* the RDF Fireballs. Any help/tips/whatever here is welcome. I want to make them look like a real fireball yet funky-magical-dorflike-cool.

As previously noted, I think this is a really good idea - I think having more realistic mythish looking fireballs (e.g. less cartoony) would be a 'good thing'(TM).

[*]Less fire - possibly colorful flames - I'm thinking of toning down the sheer amount of fire in the game so we're not constantly walking around flames. I'm also debating adding "color" to the flames in accordance to the type of fireball being used. Might look cool - might s00k.

I don't know whether it's good or necessary to tone down the amount of fire or not - after all, the only dorfs that shoot ground-igniting fireballs are regular/giant/mega RDs and they are after all shooting FIREballs. So, it's acceptable I think to have the whole map on fire if there has been a major multidorf exchange of fire (no pun intended).

If you can figure out a way to add a subtle color tint to the existing flames without totally changing the flame color or mucking up the colortables I would say go for it. If it ends up being something that by itself is going to push the 'final' release off more than a month I would say don't bother. The world is in desperate need of Rocket Dorfs, it would be criminal to delay the release any longer than necessary.

[*]Slow Fireball - adjust or replace?...
Mondo Flareball... - please comment:

Not to say that any of your ideas wouldn't result in something even better, but the slow fireballs and mondo flareballs and T-ghols are fine (and fun) as is for me.

After playing last night (2006-11-04) I had another idea with the Colossus: since their fireballs is SO powerful (and I really like it), what about giving it a little twist in that it is "mana-based"? I would have a mana bar that the enemy cannot see, but this might make them a little more balanced.

Would have to try it to have an opinion on this change.

Right now their Special Attack is a "Colossus Club" (with extra mayo) - personally I like this rather than giving them a Slow Fireball.

Agreed as long as the Colussus Club can't kill every non-colussus opponent with one swipe. 2-3 ghols/regular-rds should be able to take a Colossus in hand to hand combat all things being equal.

[*]Single Plugins? - I am seriously thinking about making the RDF plugins "one plugin" instead of two, especially since we now combine with so many other plugins. Thoughts?

I know it would make the plugins a LOT larger, and it would make churning out new versions of the plugs more complicated/time-consuming - but I think this would be a lot simpler for any non-OoH RDF hosts.

[Baak]

Based on the feedback here I think the Mondo Flareball will stay.

Now I'll just have to see if I can get it to work the way I want (where T-Ghols can toss 'em) either via the method Pyro mentioned or some other magic. There's some stuff going on with the Stunballs and Flareballs right now that make them slightly problematic: (1) Stunballs "drift" a little when dropped by Minis - I really like this effect; (2) Flareballs can "go off" (Stunballs too actually) when jostled/touched, so this might affect the way they are handled.

Bottom line: I'll see what I can do to get T-Ghols to pick up Flareballs and toss them. If I can't get it to work, then they'll just stay as they are now, which is T-Ghols "eat" them (they disappear!).



I think the fire can stay but I would like to give it a slight green tinge or something along those lines. If it's even a minor hassle to tweak, it'll be off the list.



I'm getting psyched about the new fireballs/contrails. Will have to start playing with this stuff soon(tm).



Couple of good things in regards to the "all-in-one" (one-plugin) versions of RDF:

(1) For the beta test phase (which we will make as short as possible, I promise) we only have to update the "+tagz" file, and we will leave the RDF 5.1 one in the BP. This means there will be a single 6 MB zip file download for the test iterations.

(2) By splitting up RDF Multi and RDF Solo, and by removing "hero madness", it'll make the final product smaller but still biggish. The good news is we won't have to do the chunky downloads during the beta testing.

Excellent feedback, all. Now I just need to find the time to work on this stuff...

P.S. First post of 2007!!